In class today we practiced screencasting! Here’s the result of my experimenting with it:

It does seem like screencasting is a super-useful tool. I mean, I know it is from experience with Khan Academy, but it seems like a handy skill for me to have. Like management of a wordpress website, this too feels like something I am likely to use—in one context or another.

Rich also shared a couple of interesting findings pertaining to audio-visual combinations and memory. For one thing, he said that putting up a text-filled powerpoint slide and also reading aloud from it to the class would result in us retaining less of the content, than if it had been either shown or read (not both). This comported with my experience as a student, but it was nice to have it more broadly confirmed. He also mentioned that instructional videos that were animated yielded more learning(? I don’t remember what the metric was but something like that) than non-animated ones.

On the other hand, he also said that if a primarily non-animated, talking-head-style video occasionally included animated insets, these would be experienced as distractions by viewers and rather than enhancing learning would tend to inhibit it. This point was something I had less of an intuition for, but it certainly comported with what I’d previously categorized as my personal preference—for talking head videos to be visually plain, rather than dolled up with accessories. The style of instructional video I’ve produced so far has been that of the unadorned talking head—no fancy insets, just demonstration and explanation, as I would give a student in person.